Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Droning on

by digby

I'm sure most of you are aware of all this. (And if you aren't you should be reading Greenwald and Emptywheel more often.) But this time it's in the Washington Post, mentioned as blithely as one might talk about the naming of airports and post offices:

The Obama administration’s counterterrorism accomplishments are most apparent in what it has been able to dismantle, including CIA prisons and entire tiers of al-Qaeda’s leadership. But what the administration has assembled, hidden from public view, may be equally consequential.

In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents.

Other commanders in chief have presided over wars with far higher casualty counts. But no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.

The article doesn't seem to find any of this particularly shocking. They ran it on the Monday after Christmas, so they certainly weren't looking for any publicity. But it is just a little bit disconcerting that a President who ran as an anti-war candidate and received the Nobel Peace Prize is doing it, don't you think?

Sources indicate that much of the growth of this program came about because of the growth of the technology. I guess that, like children with toys, those who have access to them simply have to use them.